A section to cover all the different problems encountered by running game x on system y! Whether it's as simple as a non-STE compatible game through to h/drive installable games. Discuss them all in here.

I’m a total newb with the Atari ST. I bought a 520ST last year and a Satandisk shortly thereafter. I finally had a chance to plug them in and take a look.

I grabbed that “1GB.rar” image and wrote the image file. The 520ST booted up just fine with the Satandisk. Aces!

I tried three games on the HD from the Satandisk: Another World, Arkanoid and Lode Runner. All three started, but displayed garbled graphics. As if they were trying to display a resolution my monitor couldn’t do. (It’s an 80s-era monitor…. don’t have it in front of me, but seems pretty standard.)

Being that I am coming from a point of pure ignorance with the ST, I guess my questions are:

1) I know the 520ST has 512KB of RAM. So it’s possible that it simply can’t run those games or many others. Is that what’s going on here?

2) Is there any sort of list of compatibility out there for the 520ST?

Lack of RAM may be a factor. If you're using a base machine with 512 KB, you've only really got something like 384 KB when booting to a GEM desktop. A lot of these games autobooted from floppy drive back in the day which bypassed that particular overhead.

Also, what hard disk driver are you using, as that will almost certainly be taking an additional chunk of memory.

So in conclusion, your 512 KB compatible game may be coming up short on memory.

I think the general advice is for a hard drive, Satandisk, or UltraSatan to be useful, you're looking at a minimum of 1 MB, so it looks like a RAM upgrade might be needed.

There are many ways to check how much RAM your machine really have. You should see it even at start of mentioned games.I guess that your Atari has 1MB min, otherwise games wouldn't even start. Here talking about hard disk fixed games, where 1MB is minimum normally.It may be some failure in machine, appearing at specific conditions. or that monitor can not 50 or 60 Hz refresh rate. Most of games there will run at 50 Hz refresh rate. Are you from USA ?I suggest to you that try more games from that 1GB.img , look what writes right after start - then will see your RAM size.

Famous Schrodinger's cat hypothetical experiment says that cat is dead or alive until we open box and see condition of poor animal, which deserved better logic. Cat is always in some certain state - regardless from is observer able or not to see what the state is.

AtariZoll wrote:There are many ways to check how much RAM your machine really have. You should see it even at start of mentioned games.I guess that your Atari has 1MB min, otherwise games wouldn't even start. Here talking about hard disk fixed games, where 1MB is minimum normally.It may be some failure in machine, appearing at specific conditions. or that monitor can not 50 or 60 Hz refresh rate. Most of games there will run at 50 Hz refresh rate. Are you from USA ?I suggest to you that try more games from that 1GB.img , look what writes right after start - then will see your RAM size.

Hi, AtariZoll! Thank you so much for your reply.

Yeah, I am from the US. I tried a few other games last night. I saw that when clicking on various TOSs to start games, I would be told that the game needed 512KB and the ST had 1MB of RAM. I did get the title screen for one game, Annihilator, to come up. But then, after hitting the space bar, everything turned black, which is the behavior I saw with the other games. (The difference being that there would be garbled graphics initially for the others.)

I'll keep investigating, looks like from a hardware perspective, everything is working correctly.